Virus-Infected Laptop Proves Terrible For a Wisconsin Man

After being attacked by a virus, Daniel J Wagner of Wisconsin (USA), 46, took his laptop to Best Buy Store for repairing it.

Apparently, the technician who tackled the repair work at the Store contacted the police after finding some images of child abuse being used as a desktop background. Similar images were discovered in the "My Pictures" folder of the PC.

As a result, police investigation took place and it disclosed almost 67 images of sexual acts, which involved children of 3-12 years old.

On May 14, 2010, Wagner was arrested by the police when he came to pick the laptop and was consequently indicted with many counts of possession of child pornography. On the record, Wagner has apparently been found guilty with 14 counts of possession of child pornography.

Investigations are still on to identify the kind of malware found on the laptop since some strains of malware install images from child abuse sites on the user's system.

Graham Cluley, Senior Technology Consultant in security firm Sophos, stated that this incident reminds him of a case which took place in 2005, when a 20-year-old German resident mistook a fake message sent by the Sober-Z worm which claimed he was being probed by Germany's Federal Crime Office (the BKA) for accessing inauthentic websites. Eventually, however, police did not discover any pornographic pictures of children on his system after he surrendered himself to the police, as per the news published by sophos.com on May 18, 2010.

Further, Cluley informed that it is also a fact that there has been an extensive history of people being accused of possessing child abuse images. But subsequently, they get clear through the case after claiming that it is the work of a hacker.

The case of a Massachusetts state employee, Michael Fiola would be a good example. He was released free from the charges of possessing child pornography in June 2008, after computer forensics stated that his official laptop was infected with harmful software that was secretly visiting unlawful sites.